• by Gaetano Pollice , January 29, 2008

It s kind of comforting to know that for every Life&Style Weekly profile of Joy Behar’s apartment and E! Online video clip of Britney’s latest drug store cowgirl escapade, a group like PETA isn’t afraid to go balls out in targeting fur-friendly celebs. Its youth animal rights offshoot, peta2, now has new targets: occasional actresses Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen.

Launched in December with more than 280,000 visits to date, peta2’s “Trollsen Twins” site (peta2.com/trollsens) takes the Olsens to the mat for wearing fur and flaunting it in their clothing line, The Row. The site streams a cheery video that splices together scenes from Full House with clips of furry critters getting bludgeoned to death, trumpets a call-to-action for visitors to tell the twins off and, best of all, offers an interactive dress-up game.

In “Fatal Fashion,” users can dress the twins in fur-lined accoutrements, fresh from the carcass and dripping with blood. The Olsens’ frighteningly accurate caricatures — whose skeletal bodies are topped with bulbous, Children of the Corn-esque heads — leer at you as you play Barbie, their pupils following your mouse’s movements.

According to PETA’s marketing manager, Joel Bartlett, “This kind of word-of-mouth marketing campaign is one of the most effective ways of engaging young people.” He’s not kidding — not only did the microsite’s launch rank as the second-highest day of traffic in peta2’s history, but the Full House video has appeared The O’Reilly Factor; garnered posts on Perez Hilton, DListed and TMZ; and the word “Trollsen” even racks up about 150,000 results on Google. Even if the twins remain unconvinced, the site’s hot-pink “Bloody Bunny Slip-Ons” with X’d out eyes should, at the very least, keep the clicks coming.